Sprinklings of history, a smidgen of genealogy, a dash of art & a dusting of architecture, all mixed together with my eccentric fascinations

09 October 2014

England: Hay Tor, Dartmoor National Park

Walking
on Dartmoor – what a fabulous introduction to Devon!

We parked
at the National Park Visitor Centre near Hay Tor and from there wandered wherever
the notion took us. The moor was covered with bracken, which was just beginning
to turn from the usual vibrant green to its orange, yellow and brown autumn
colours, as well as two types of heather, flowering pink and purple, all interspersed
with grassy areas and patches of soggy peat.

We
headed off on a bit of a circuit of various tors, the huge piles of exposed
granite that dot the landscape, particularly the tops of hills. At our first
tor we discovered, purely by chance – well, actually I was trying to get close
enough to a wee bird to get a good photo – a plastic box containing three
rubber stamps, a stamp pad and a notebook – and this was my introduction to the
‘sport’ of letterboxing. It was invented on Dartmoor
in the 1850s but has now spread throughout the world.

There
are two aspects to letterboxing: if you want you can deposit your own
letterbox, with a stamp in it – often something unique – plus a pad and a log
book. You need to hide the box somewhere, not too obvious but in a place you can
find again as you may need to maintain it. You can also be someone who goes
letterboxing – following a set of clues, usually published in a leaflet by the
local club, or simply by following your nose and checking all the rock piles
you find as you walk. The idea is that you keep your own logbook into which you
make an impression of the stamps you find, along with their location, and you ink
your own stamp in the logbooks of other boxes you find, with a hello message
for the owner.

We
didn’t actually know how the system was supposed to work when we found our
first box so just wrote a message in the logbook and took photos. Later, on
Facebook, I tried unsuccessfully to get more clues for a further walk but the
local club person was on holiday and no one else was prepared to scan a few
pages of their leaflet and send them to us. A shame as we would’ve spent
another day trying to find more – I do love a good treasure hunt!

Onwards
… we followed the tracks of old tramways, used for hauling granite from quarries
on the moor to local towns and cities. The moor is littered with tumbling
piles of colossal granite boulders – the random shapes were caused by molten lava that
was pushed up from the depths of the earth in plate movements millions of years
ago. Over the centuries, smaller boulders have been used to build the dry-stone
walls that divide the farmland in this part of the country. It looked like
someone had been repairing the tumbled-down walls and we did our bit to help by
placing our own boulders in a couple of gaps.

Viv repairs a dry-stone wall

Through
a gate with a sign marked ‘Beware of Bull’ (luckily there was none), we
discovered a Devon Wildlife Trust Nature Reserve that included a bog, Becka Brook
Mire (luckily not too soggy), and Emsworthy, an old house and farm buildings,
now mostly ruins though the barn has a new roof and nesting boxes for barn owls
inside. We mooched around the ruins, taking photos of the magnificent old trees,
the fascinating tiny lichens and sedums growing on the rocks, and a couple of rather
spectacular big fungus growths on one of the trees.

As
well as the flora we discovered growing all over the moorland, there was also
an abundance of fauna. The local not-so-wild life included the rather comically
coloured Belted Galloway cattle, Scottish Black-face sheep and, of course, the
ponies Dartmoor is famous for. These ponies
are no longer wild, but are allowed to roam and graze on the common lands of
the moor during the summer months before being taken down in the winter to their owners’ farms. They are gorgeous (and I couldn’t help including lots of photos
of them here).

We saw
lots of little birds, flitting from one bracken top to another but most were too
distant and quick for good photos. We chased pretty butterflies, laughed at bonking bumblebees, and admired purple-skinned
beetles.

Hay
Tor was our last stop of the day. At an altitude of 457 metres (1499 feet), it’s
the highest local viewpoint and provides stunning panoramas of the surrounding
countryside, as well as the Devon coastline and the English
Channel beyond.

From
there we drove the dramatic road down and uphill to Widecombe-in-the-Moor for
an early dinner – we’d got so carried away with our wandering that we’d had no
lunch, not even a drink, all day. Widecombe is a charming little village and the pub,
the Old Inn, served us a scrumptious meal, with some delicious and rather
potent local cider to wash it down. It was the perfect end to a most excellent
day.

About Me

I am a writer and photographer; project
manager and English teacher; knitter and genealogist; fungi forayer and bird
watcher; countryside rambler and city strider; volunteer and child sponsor; tree
lover and cat person; researcher and blogger; nemophilist; and traveller.